Download The Spread of Islam

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Class
Connections: Links Between Geography and History
The Spread of Islam
The Middle East is sometimes called the "World of Islam," for this common
faith acts as a unifying force in a scattered and diverse region. Yetthe Islamic
world today extends far beyond the borders of Arabia. Islam claims more than
1 billion oUhe e<!rth's_~pUl!Qn!nhabita_nts-one in every five. Muslims
predominate in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
Indonesia. Smaller but still substantial numbers live in central and southern
Africa, India, China, the Philippines, and parts of Northern Eurasia and
Western Europe.
A Wildfire from the Desert
The map on the next page shows where Islam
began. At Mecca, a trade crossroads in the
desert of the Arabian Peninsula, an Arab
named Muhammed was born in A.D. 570. A
thoughtful man who often prayed alone in
the desert, Mun.am::i..cd in the year 610 had a
vision in which the angel Gabriel told him
that he was to become the "Messenger of
God." After this vision, Muhammed came to
see himself as a prophet whose central teaching was the absolute unity of God - Allah, in
Arabic. He called on men and women to submit to the "will of Allah" - the literal meaning of Islam.
At first, the new religion grew slowly.
Many Arabs preferred their many gods to the
Allah preached by Muhammed. But as Islam
won converts, some Meccans began to worry
that Muhammed's
monotheistic teaching
would undercut the lucrative pilgrimage
traffic to the shrines of the many Meccan
deities and decided to kill him. Muhammed
secretly fled Mecca in A.D. 622 with a small
band of believers for the neighboring town of
Medina-an
emigration, or hef{ira, from
which Muslims date their calendar. Eventually, Muhammed and his followers won control of Medina, and in 630, Muhammed returned to Mecca with 10,000 warriors-the
most powerful religious and political leader
in Arabia.
After Muhammed's death in A.D. 632,
leaders called caliphs carried on his mission
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Unit7
Under the leadership of the first four caliphs,
the new religion spread like wildfire. In just
20 years, Arabic armies, skilled in the ways of
desert warfare and enflamed with zeal for jihad, or the holy war that would guarantee
their entrance into paradise, swept over the
wide, flat deserts of North Africa and Southwest Asia.
From 661 to 750, a new dynasty of caliphs
directed the Muslim empire from Damascus
what is wave
now Syria.
Under conquests
their leadership,
ain second
of military
shook
the world. Parts of Central Asia and India
came under Islamic control, as did all of
northern Africa. Then the Muslims crossed
the Strait of Gibraltar and pushed onto the
Iberian Peninsula, across the Pyrenees, and
on into southern France. Finally, 100 miles
from the gates of Paris, the Islamic warriors
were stopped in the Battle of Tours (732) and
forced back to the iberian Peninsula.
The Golden Age of Islam and Beyond
In 750, yet another dynasty of caliphs-the
Abbasids-shifted
the capital once again,
this time to Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. For
the next 500 years, while European culture
was in eclipse, the Abbasids preserved -and
translated into Arabic-Greek
science and
philosophy and Persian literature and history.
In addition, they made significant contributions of their own, especially in the fields
of mathematics, astronomy, architecture,
medicine, and geography.
Corlneetions'
Links Bt'tween
Geography
and History
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During this cultural flowering, Islam continued to spread to ever more distant realms.
Now, however, it was transmitted more often
by traders than by warriors. Camel caravans
carried the faith across the Sahara to Mali,
Songhai, and Bornu in West Africa. Merchant
ships transmitted it to East Africa and those
parts of Southeast Asia known today as Indonesia and Malaysia.
In time, a number of non-Arabic ethnic
groups embraced Islam and forged their own
Muslim empires: the Mughals in India; the
Safavids in Persia (now Iran); the Ottoman
Turks in Asia Minor (the peninsula bordered
by the Mediterranean, Black, and Aegean
seas), Egypt, Syria, and much of southeastern
Europe, western Asia, and North Africa.
Today the era of vast empires unified by
the Islam religion has passed. Yet Islam remains the heart of most Middle Eastern cultures. And outside this core region, the Muslim faith continues to expand. According to
some estimates, it is the fastest-growing religion in the world.
The Spread of Islam, 632-1258
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Directions: Use information from the essay and the map to complete the activities.
Write your answers on the back of this paper or on a separate sheet of paper.
A. Geography Focus
1. Interaction What physical feature slowed the Umayyad cali?hs as they pushed
northward from the Iberian Peninsula?
2. Movement
In what two main ways was Islam spread throughout the world?
B. Critical Thinking
1. Distinguishing false from Accurate Images What facts in the essay refute the
commonly held assumption that nll Muslims are Arabs7
2. Predicting Consequences If the Arab Muslims had not been stopped at Tours, what
might the consequences have been 7
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